Contemporary Legend Research

Urban Legends are contemporary stories, told as true but incorporating ancient and modern elements from folklore

Much of my research - including my interest in aspects of journalism - is centred upon the study of contemporary legend. Such legends are
contemporary stories, told as true but incorporating ancient and modern
elements from folklore. CL research is a comparatively new
field of study that was pioneered in the UK by the Centre for English
Cultural Tradition and Folklore, University of Sheffield. A conference,
'Perspectives on Contemporary Legend' held in Sheffield during 1982 led to
the foundation of the International Society for Contemporary Legend
Research (ISCLR), now in its 30th year, which holds an annual conference
at venues in Europe and North America.

Usually attributed to a "friend of a friend" contemporary legends are
passed on by word-of-mouth but are also found embedded in jokes, adverts,
films and 'true stories' circulated by the mass media and email. These
stories usually reflect themes of modern life in cities and suburbs and
revolve around topics such as crime, technology, sex, professions,
conspiracies and celebrities. This type of legend appears to originate in
a diffuse body of beliefs, prejudices, fears and experiences current in
all modern communities. Their plots often revolve around anxieties
surrounding modern behaviour or inventions such as motor cars, terrorists,
hitch-hiking, mobile phones and microwave ovens. Their content, whilst
sometimes amusing, is often bizarre, frightening or macabre.

Stories of this kind are also known as 'modern legends', FOAF-tales (from
the 'friend of a friend') and 'urban myths' - the latter usage occurs
frequently in media discourse to label a false or unattributed story. Some
'contemporary legends' are clearly not modern, not urban and are not
always true - for instance some are told merely for entertainment, or as
jokes. But whatever their purpose they are usually told as being "based on
a true story". Narrators claim "it happened to someone they knew", usually
a 'friend of a friend', but the source is always anonymous. 'Urban
legends' have been adopted by folklorists and by the general public to
refer to any unverified, odd or 'true stories' that circulate both on the
grapevine and in the media in the modern world.

Despite their worldwide distribution 'urban legends' were not identified,
collected and studied until relatively recently. The American folklorist
Richard M. Dorson first focused attention on the genre in his 1959 book
American Folklore. But it was not until the 1980s, when the US folklorist
Jan Harold Brunvand published the first in his series of urban legend
collections, The Vanishing Hitchhiker (1981), that the phrase 'urban
legend' came into popular usage both in North America and Western Europe.
Brunvand produced a series of follow-ups including an Encyclopedia of
Urban Legends (2001, all published in the USA by W. Norton & Co, New
York) which have proved immensely popular.

Stories about urban legends continue to appear frequently in the media
and in film, TV and the internet, reflecting the public fascination with
'a good story'. Examples of my research into two popular contemporary
legends, ‘The Crying Boy painting’ and ‘The photograph that took itself’,
appeared as chapters in The Martians Have Landed!: A History of Media
Driven Panics and Hoaxes (2012), Bartholomew, Robert E and Radford,
Benjamin (editors), Jefferson, N.C: McFarland.